Sunny side up
Ed Miliband is right to say (“Here comes the sun”, Winter Special) the transition away from fossil fuels is “unstoppable”, but he will also know many are trying to prove him wrong.
The world is moving on from fossil fuels. The positive tipping points discussed by Miliband and Bill McKibben will ensure that clean power is cheaper than coal or gas, that electric vehicles are better value than petrol or diesel ones and that heat pumps are a better choice than gas boilers. Meanwhile, a clean energy system is being built with astonishing speed. The amount of coal-generated electricity fell in both India and China last year. Every other car sold in China is electric. Its demand for oil may decline faster than anyone expected.
But the question for the UK is whether we will be able to ride the wave of technological change and revive our ailing economy. The cross-party consensus on climate action has broken down. Conservative and Reform politicians, cheered on by GB News and the right-wing press, are desperate to turn the clock back. We should ask, whose interests are they serving? Money is pouring into climate scepticism, targeted at net zero this time.
Fortunately, public support for climate action remains strong, as does business support. Energy firms have committed £77bn to improving UK infrastructure. Contrast that with the £40bn the government spent protecting families from the soaring cost of gas after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, which means our bills are around £500 a year higher today.
Acting ambitiously on the climate makes as much sense as it ever did. But we have a battle on our hands, and will need to make the case over and over.
Shaun Spiers, executive director, Green Alliance
Ed Miliband’s optimism that populism and the fossil fuel lobby will ultimately be unable to derail the energy transition relies on people seeing tangible benefits from the transition in their own lives.
Community energy—when groups of people organise to build and run renewable energy generation schemes—can do this, and the UK’s community energy sector already creates remarkable benefits for people and their local areas. Yet, currently it is tiny, with only a few hundred schemes in operation, accounting for less than half a per cent of our electricity-generating capacity.
The potential for growth is huge. Studies, including an inquiry by the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee, have said that it could grow 20-fold in 10 years, especially if parliament legislated to enable people to buy directly from local community energy schemes. The Local Electricity Bill—which we drafted—aims to do this and, when in opposition, Miliband supported it. On 15th July last year the energy minister Michael Shanks told the Commons the government will make this change.
Since then, nothing on this has been forthcoming, leading to nearly 100 MPs, including 23 Labour backbenchers, to sign an Early Day Motion, “Buying community energy locally”, which calls on the government to do what it promised.
We will continue to call on the government to walk the talk so that our communities and the climate can benefit from community energy’s huge potential.
Steve Shaw, director, Power for People
In extolling the supposedly immeasurable benefits of switching to renewable energy, Ed Miliband mentions the chancellor’s November 2025 budget announcement of a £150 reduction in bills. But this planned reduction has not been made possible because of any economic savings directly linked to any net zero or climate policies (quite the opposite, in fact, as the financial costs of its relentless pursuit of net zero have only been escalating). And yet the energy secretary seems to imply that it has, which is especially curious as the chancellor herself made no link between clean energy policies and reductions in energy bills.
The UK hasn’t needed to rely on imports for fuel. It has instead chosen, for decades and at a massive cost to every British citizen, to leave us at the mercy of those who supply and control that fuel. And all the while vast and rich sources of fossil fuel have existed untapped beneath our own feet and in the North Sea. How much lower might all our bills be if we’d sourced what was on our own doorstep? By how many billions might we have boosted our economy if we’d exported a percentage of that fuel?
Miliband and other net zero zealots are going to need some real evidence-based examples of the cost-effectiveness of switching to renewable energy. They are hardly going to convince the many climate-change cynics merely by mentioning a few pounds off our energy bills; or a couple of hours of free energy in a few Australian states; or by simply hoping that China does its bit to reduce its huge emissions—hardly likely, considering the potentially world-dominating industrial expansion it is currently implementing.
Stefan Badham, Portsmouth
The bloated cover story was apparently “edited for length and clarity”. This sadly did not redress the mutual backslapping of the participants. Perhaps inviting Dieter Helm would have enlivened events, since he has described British energy policy as failing all its self-described claims, being “not cheap, not home-grown and not secure”.
Edward Laxton, London
Labour’s hollow victory
Stuart McGurk (“The curious rise of Morgan McSweeney”, Winter Special) was essential reading on the Labour crisis. Alastair Campbell was right to say there is no value in wooing those on the right—in this case supporters of Nigel Farage’s party—at the cost of people to the left who desperately want to vote Labour. But the problem is not simply about Reform, since at the 2024 general election less than 10m people voted Labour. (At the previous two elections, more than 10m voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s broader approach). The 2024 result was in part a fluke produced by an increased number of options on ballot papers across the UK, splitting the vote.
With Reform now polling at levels that would put Farage in Number 10 while Labour struggles to top 18 per cent, it is clear that Keir Starmer is failing to win over deserters while other progressive parties win support. That Starmer still backs McSweeney is ominous.
McSweeney’s polling during the 2020 leadership election found that the Labour party membership was a quarter Corbynite left, another quarter of instrumentalist appeasers, and half idealists—or to be more accurate, principled soft leftists. But now the Corbynites are disappearing to the farce of Your Party and the soft left is going to the Greens or Lib Dems, leaving a rump attracted to Blue Labour, or Labour Together. This may be enough to maintain the status quo. In which case the Labour party will follow the Liberal party of Lloyd George and Asquith into the wilderness, and Starmer will be a one-term prime minister.
Trevor Fisher, Stafford
Playing the long Dane
Lost in the furore about Labour’s latest immigration control wheeze (“Yes, Shabana Mahmood is ‘appeasing populist opinion’”, Prospect online) is that the government’s borrowing of policy from Denmark has been carefully and quietly limited to only one half of their approach.
The Danes have long recognised that armed conflicts and hopeless poverty are the mainsprings of the movements of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, so hand-in-hand with a sharp limitation on the numbers of refugees they accept has been a long-term steadfast commitment to meeting the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of their gross national income (GNI) on overseas aid. They have met this target continuously from 1978. When they fell short in 2022, they immediately increased spending the following year.
Whatever you think about restrictions on accepting refugees, there is an undeniable logic in addressing the push factors that, in the long term, are the only hope for reducing the incentives for people to flee their homelands and come thousands of miles, only to endure hostility.
Contrast this with the UK government, which has announced plans to continue to reduce aid contributions, which by 2027 will have been shredded by more than half in six years (down from 0.7 per cent in 2020). This combination of dishonesty and callousness is likely to be accompanied by futility.
Laurence Lustgarten, Oxford
Man of God
Grace Spencer’s piece on the theistic debate being carried on within the Quaker community (“Disagreement among friends”, December) was enlightening and refreshing when viewed against the backdrop of stubborn orthodoxy and the lack of vision in 21st-century Christianity. I was sorry, though, that she didn’t address the tricky but significant question of what is God or what does it look like.
It is possible to conjecture, without a statistical survey, that the large majority of self-identifying Christians still perceive and feel comfortable with a traditional God—a humanoid with human emotions and ambitions, gender and personality—a man, perhaps a little like Harold Macmillan, sitting comfortably on a throne in a chamber of cumulonimbus somewhere above us.
This perception was recorded by the earliest authors of the Hebrew scriptures who gave birth to God as metaphor, expanded, embellished and adapted to embody the essence of humanity and the universe which they didn’t have the knowledge to understand nor the vocabulary to explain. Their view of God as creator was part of the then prevailing myth of the origins of mankind. However, although the creation story of Genesis is largely disowned by modern Christians, along with the Old Testament image of God as irascible puppeteer, the concept of an anthropomorphic God endures.
A broader, more rational depiction of God was powerfully expressed in the 17th century by Spinoza, who described God not as a creator, nor as a person with emotions, desires or intentions. God, for Spinoza, was the one infinite, eternal and essential substance.
In the early 20th century Carl Gustav Jung defined an internal God, a psychological reality existing in the subconscious human mind—a God to be known through experience not explanation; an archetype, a universally shared image from our collective unconscious, a guide and motivator.
For the past 1,700 years, the core dogma has survived on the basis of conflicting and unreliable reportage by the gospel writers. Belief in the most miraculous events, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection, has relied entirely on faith, which can be defined as no more than the capacity and readiness to believe the unbelievable.
Dogma rooted in such flimsy soil is vulnerable. To be relevant and beneficent among humankind, it isn’t only the Quakers, but Christianity as a whole, that needs to reform its perception and understanding of what is God.
Peter Burden, Bromfield, Shropshire
A creed against greed
There must be a point at which corporate greed damages big business’s own monetary interests (“Whither capitalism?”, Winter Special). Or is the unlimited-profit objective somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the fable of the frog who is stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
Could it be that a bunch of morbidly greedy corporate officers know their big businesses will collapse if too many consumers lose their jobs to AI or other forms of automation; or if workers aren’t paid adequately, yet continue lobbying for the very economic system that enables these problems.
Perhaps they realise an intervention by a truly independent body or entity may be needed, one completely untouchable by corporate lobbyists. “We scorpions simply cannot help ourselves. We need externally independent intervention, but we will still resist it. It’s in our nature.”
Frank Sterle Jr, White Rock, British Columbia, Canada
Unjust desserts
Regarding Sheila Hancock’s column (Long life, Winter Special) about losing the desserts from her local garage, I am sorry to report that our big Tesco has gone the same way. A perfectly good café has been replaced by “choosing screens” and a dearth of workers. I hate them. Mind you, it will be beneficial for local “proper” cafes.
P1erre, via the website
You can describe Donald Trump and his actions in many different ways, but he is certainly not “the increasingly senile leader of the western world’’, as described by Hancock. Senile he definitely is not; that would be the least of our present worries if he were.
Diran Meghreblian, Richmond upon Thames, Surrey
